In praise of ... agriculture

Nostalgia is human, but it doesn't half distort our grasp of the past, particularly when it comes to food. From Friedrich Engels - who fantasised about the "primitive communism" of tribesmen - to new-age nutritionists who advocate munching only on things that can be foraged from forests, self-hating modernists have indulged in rose-tinted retrospection. Now Tom Standage - in a lively new "edible history of humanity" - goes further, insisting that the shift to agriculture was the biggest mistake humanity ever made. Hunter-gatherers, he says, worked only half the hours of early farmers; they also suffered less disease and lived more equally. Maybe so, but it is all beside the point when no amount of berry-gathering or deer-trapping could fill the 6.7 billion mouths, a billion of them undernourished, which the world must feed today. It took farming to achieve food surpluses, which freed people to think beyond filling their stomachs. In the early days only a small elite could avoid labouring on the land, but the number has grown with each agricultural innovation and now includes most people on the planet. The cost to the environment of some technologies on has undoubtedly been too high, but the right response is to get smarter, not to go back to the past. Marx wrote whimsically about a good life where one could shepherd one part of the day before becoming a "critical critic" in another. But such portfolio careers are only an option when dinner is taken care of. In an important sense, agriculture is the precondition of culture.